Saturday, March 09, 2013

BYOD: 7 reasons to leave them to their own devices

BYOD isn’t a recommendation, it’s a realty. Everyone’s
bought one and everyone uses one and everyone carries it around with them. When
we organise a meeting or conference, we don’t send people an email telling them
what device to bring, neither do we buy or lease a whole load of computers and
hand them out. In our Universities few want to revive those expensive projects
where every student was given a laptop or iPad. They bring their own.

In business, BYOD is big business. By 2014 Gartner estimate that 90% of employees will have access to enterprise software from at least two devices. Most employees would be frustrated if their employer did not allow access from their owned devices. Note that there's a big difference between allowing devices to access your network and enterprise software and using BYOD in schools to simply access the internet.

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) v BEND (Buy
Everyone a New Device)

Paul Hynes of the George Spencer Academy in Nottingham
operates a BYOD policy that gives access to free, filtered web access (no passwords).
He points out that there’s some underlying problems with a tablet-only
approach; lockdown, updates, damage, iTunes, the illusion of personalisation,
tech problems with displays, printers, wireless, also difficulties in storage
and sharing. I’m with him on this and have real doubts about the rush to spendlarge sums on tablet projects in schools. There are several reasons for
preferring BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) to BEND (Buy Everyone a New Device):

1. Reduces costs

The big BYOD advantage is cost, the total cost of BEND in
terms of purchase, leasing, insurance, maintenance and sustainability. Then there’s
the often hidden costs of procurement and on-going management of owned kit. It
may well be defunct long before its depreciated in your accounts. Parents and
students have already spent considerable amounts of money on kit they
researched, selected and use regularly. Surely we could use our education
budgets better to focus on other things, like teacher issues and learning.

2. Reduces risks

Why would you want to take a punt on untried technology that
will bring fiscal, technical, insurance and pedagogic restraints, when much of
the kit has already been bought and is in the hands of learners? Create a risk
register, with scores for appetite, likelihood and impact, along with ways of
making each risk manageable and you’ll see that BYOD, far from increasing,
decreases overall risk You also head off
parental criticism about wasting valuable school resources….

3. Existing skills

The fact that they know how to use their own kit is a plus
and if they don’t know how to do something on their own kit, what makes you
think they will on a new and stranger one? In any case isn’t it important to
learn how to use your own tools and not other, unfamiliar ones?

4. Motivation

The fact that it is your own kit means it’s less likely to
get damaged or lost. There are some horror stories of damaged, knocked and lost
kit, with substantial claims on insurance. You automatically tap into the care
that personal ownership brings. I’d also wager that you’re far more likely to
get students to use their own kit at home, rather than bought kit. One could
argue that a wide range of devices may create a range of problems. This is
offset by the fact that students are likely to know how to use their own kit
and problem solve themselves to get connected, print and save data. They are
more likely to own the problems and therefore solve them. Lastly, I suspect that the motivation to learn is more prevalent on owned devices.

5. Learning not leasing

Paul Hynes recommends “10 no-brainer uses with an impact on
learning” for teachers and an approach that allows teachers to be confident,
manage classes and defend the use of technology. Exactly! Let’s look at
learning not leasing. Surely much of the budget would be better spent on
teacher impact than capital expenditure.

6. More relevant

BYOD is more relevant in that it is more likely to mimic the
real world and the workplace. Few workplaces have iPads or tablets, most have
desktops, laptops and mobiles. If we’re creating autonomous adults and
learners, surely we must recognise what’s actually used out there.

7. Already happens

At home, school students already use their own devices to do
their homework, communicate with their mates about assignments and exams,
communicate with the school, even in the school, especially when the school kit
is a bit crappy or too slow.

Problems: safety, inclusion & technical

Like BYOD, students can get up to no good. The whole
e-safety debate can freeze progress, yet students know the rules and teachers
know how to get the rules obeyed. Let’s be clear here, the student should NOT
be allowed to access unsuitable content. You need a policy or be brave enough
to leave this to the teachers’ discretion. But it’s the same issue BYOD or BEND.

Inclusion can also be an issue, as wealthier students
showboat their expensive laptops or tablets. However, we can use the money
saved to help solve this problem. Data suggests that this is a bottle
-three-quarters-full issue, simply needing a top-up. We can’t let the absence
of a few pieces of kit cancel out progress. Some kids don’t have books at home,
we don’t then say, let’s not use books in learning.

I should add that I’m not a big fan of parachuting computers
in any form into classrooms. Classrooms are spaces where teachers interact with
learners, places of dialogue and feedback. The introduction of tablets,
notebooks, laptops and mobiles are, without very careful planning, most likely to
interrupt and slow down learning. Flip the classroom and let students use these
for assignments, homework (oh how I hate that word) and exposition. Let
teachers teach and students learn.

Conclusion

Prescribed tablet and laptop projects are part of an
old-world view that there is an ideal or optimum technology in learning. To be
frank, many of these projects are driven less by reason than desire. You can
free yourself from idiosyncratic projects, Apple fanboys, large vendors and
horrendous insurance and maintenance problems through BYOD. Most of all, the
BEND approach is damn EXPENSIVE. What of almost ALL of that money could be
saved or spent on learning, teachers and problem solving? Want to help student
learn - leave them to their own devices.

I'm dead against the large scale purchase of tablets for schools see "Too cool for school: 7 reasons why tablets should NOT be used in education" http://bit.ly/YQkGXv In the UK we have a relatively high level of device ownership among pupils. In terms of the bottom line, I think BYOD topped up with support for poorer students is the way forward.

Thanks for your article, it's agood summary of the attention areas for the debate around BYOD. I'm a parent of a kid at local primary school, that currently has a netbook lease program for senior students - I plan to make a pitch to school council to evolve that program into BYOD program (enhanced by use of cross platform (or cloud) open source software tools), but one of the greatest challenges I think I see is the reluctance of educators to embrace the culture of varied technology. They seem to freak out at the thought of teaching across different platforms. Personally I think that it enhances the focus on teaching concepts and generic approaches, rather than point and click lessons, but DOES require teachers to be technically confident. But I think a large majority of primary teachers are not "tech savvy" and are intimidated by the variance in technologies that BYOD would bring to the classroom. I'd be interested in how schools have addressed curriculum development in a BYOD environment?

Thanks Jason. Teaching is a top down activity and to be fair teachers do have to maintain some degree of control over students and their classrooms. However,many of their fears around tech are, as you state, a bit irrational. On the curriculum, if they look at what they want to teach and select online resources and tools that are generally we-based, they should have no problem. This is the problem with the current vogue for APPS - it locks you into one system or another. The web has more than enough resources for good content without these lock-ins. Good luck with you efforts. I hope my arguments can be used as grist for the mill.

For me, the biggest problem with BYODS is to ensure that online University services and learning resources are accessible from any device (i.e cross-platform). This cannot always be the case. For instance, there is a huge bank of educational resources that have been developed in Flash. Anyone using an IPad will not be able to access these resources as Flash is not supported. My institution does not have the time and resources to convert all our in-house resources into HTML5. However, our students can always fall-back on our University's IT facilities to access these resources.

Similarly, some of the technologies we subscribe to take time to catch-up with the rapidly changing world of IT. For instance, our VLE (from a commercial provider) has only now introduced option of Mobile-compatible quizzes and its still limited to a few question types compared to the desktop version.

These are reasonable thoughts and need addressing. First, I'm not so sure that iPads are such a popular choice among students. In my experience netbooks and laptops are far more common, for reasons I outlines in another post (see my recent post on tablets). In any case, rather than spending huge sums of new hardware and software you can help those with iPads use workarounds for Flash on iPads - there are browsers and other solutions that allow Flash to be played on iPads. Most students, I guess, would know this and how to get it done.The second point is more serious, but even them most students have notebooks or laptops, so the VLE is not a problem. In Universities I am not suggesting that BYOB means all mobiles. In fact, I suspect that most Universities already have a BYOB behaviour and that a reasonable analysis would show that your limited IT spend would be better spent on supporting owned BYOB kit than spending and maintaining large numbers of new devices. Hoep this helps - you raised a couple of good points.

Thanks for putting this together, Donald. While some may argue if BYOD is really worth it, an important realization here is that it's today's reality. Then again, accountability and responsible use should be upheld.

This 'reality' argument is key. Buying truckloads of tablets and laptops is, in my opinion, a thing of the past. Unfortunately, schooling is still very much a command and control culture (at any cost).